(Needless to say) on Bowie
Clearly I’m not the only one who’s taking this like a death in the family, a big one at that. Wandering around with that hollowed out, restless feeling, calling relatives and old friends. Yesterday was spent ramping up to the inevitable evening activities, i.e., binge-watching dozens of his videos, of all shapes and sizes, starting with his brilliant auto-obituaries from the new record, digging back through the original 1967 “Space Oddity,” onto the surprisingly rich and informative Dinah Shore (!) interviews with him and Iggy Pop, the MTV classics etc, winding our way across the brilliant parodies (Flight of the Conchords of course, but also the exceptional Brothers McLeod’s “Warszawa”), finally ending with the beautiful live version of “Fantastic Voyage”, which more than ever seems to say everything there is to say about, well, everything.
What’s happening here? I don’t tend to get too caught up in celebrity death, even when it’s a hero. Not to make too horrible a comparison, but Boulez’ recent passing…it interested me and gave me pause, intellectually and I suppose artistically, and of course a human life is a human life. But frankly (really no offense intended, but needless to say I had no personal relationship with him) it didn’t ruin my afternoon. This one feels far different, and this is strange, because while Bowie’s been very important to me (I will pit my Low/Heroes/Lodger obsession against anyone’s, and I’ve had the requisite number of stoned discussions of his music over the years), he was never the primary devotional spirit to me that he was for so many people. So I’m surprised by my own reaction, though I’m quickly realizing that I’m not alone either in terms of intensity or surprise at feeling same.
The wealth of material out there - just go to the davidbowie.com homepage - is the first thing: it feels like an incredible gift to all of us, to humanity, a lifetime of thought, work, artistry, effort - just put out there for the world to engage with. (Yes he got famous and made money, he wanted that and he got it, but why should we begrudge that? Lots of people do the same and don’t leave us with nearly as much, if anything, of value.) Some of it - much of it - is simply perfect without qualification, right out of the box. Other things that just last week seemed ignorable or even lamentable for their excess, pretension, self-conscious artistry - these just seem fabulous now. Suddenly the over-produced videos of the 80s (Loving the Alien for example) seem like much appreciated gifts - cultural toys in the best possible sense, food for our senses, our minds, our spirits. Because from the mid-70s on, certainly from the mid-eighties, and most of all in 2015, when he knew he was dying and chose to make Blackstar, there was no reason for him to try so hard. Why bother with the risk of reinvention? He touches on this himself during the aforementioned Dinah Shore interview, explaining why he was happy to spend months playing keyboard on an Iggy tour (“I’m quite rich you know, I can do what I like”). I watched at least 4 different versions of “Heroes” last night - I’m not crazy about all of them, but I kept thinking about the process, the willingness to remake, to keep trying, to stay engaged. Not just because it eventually gets him to the masterpieces, but because even the lesser works (relatively speaking) had - and continue to have - so much in them.
But it’s not just that he stayed engaged or that his work has such staying power. It’s not just that he was a serious, searching, and deeply intuitive artist (as an old and dear friend said after watching Lazarus, “expressionist to the end”), it’s more that for those of us feeling this - whether we were born in 1959 or 2000 - it turns out that it was David Bowie - more than anyone else, and unlike anyone else - who gave us the idea of what it means to do art, to be an artist. On an ongoing basis, he worked in pretty much every medium available - words (sung or recited), music, performance art, dance, visual image, theater, film, am I leaving anything out? He did so at every cultural strata (Young Americans and Let’s Dance on one end, full blown pop hits that needed no explanation or back-story; Alabama Song and Peter and the Wolf on the other). Not only that (because one could say the same thing in some sense about Boulez, performing Zappa; or Zappa, performing Varese; i.e., respectful nods or brief forays across some smaller-than-you-might-think part of the cultural divide), but Bowie actually straddled those strata, validating the quantum cultural leaps we were all making in our own lives (i.e., watching a double bill of Fassbinder and Bugs Bunny, listening to Abba and Xenakis back to back; writing scholarly papers referencing all of them, etc.), and TRYING to do in our own art. And I’d argue he was more viscerally persuasive in this regard than anyone I can think of - Warhol, DF Wallace, Zizek, you name it. Obviously he had precursors, in fact he absorbed influences like a sponge - everything he did had its roots somewhere else, that was kind of the point - but it all came out sui generis. (Who else could see - or build - a coherent image out of, among others, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, the New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop?) In the end his medium was the zeitgeist itself, riding it, playing with it, ultimately shaping it. Hard to think of any other artist of our era who did that - but people like Picasso, Richard Wagner, that level - these are the ones who come to mind. And I’m ashamed to say I wouldn’t have thought to put him in that category before yesterday. In practice, he was already there.
Tim Page wrote a very nice post yesterday, quoting someone (I’m embarrassed that I’ve already forgotten who) re Noel Coward (to the effect of, ‘there might be a better playwright, a better composer, etc. - but you’d need 14 of them’). But with respect to all concerned, I think it was more than Bowie’s polymathic skill, more than his ability to do so many things so ‘well.’ More, I think it had to do with where the artistry actually resided, i.e., in the persona itself - not the life lived (which wasn’t really any of our business, he made that clear right to the end) but the person projected outward. He cut through the Gordion knot of the modern, media-saturated artist, how to reconcile life and art, how to fascinate the world with who one is without risking seeming hypocritical or disappointing. (Maybe this has something to do with the ontology of his presence, something like that…) Meaning: it’s not possible to imagine finding out any detail of Bowie’s life that would make any of the work questionable (not naming any names here, but just go through anyone else on your list and see if you can say the same). I’m not sure if that’s really the important thing here, or if I’m qualified to render an opinion as to what ‘the’ important thing would be. Perhaps it’s a simple as finding it very hard to imagine what life would have been like - in all sorts of ways - without David Bowie. And the equally stunning realization (which in its own way confirms the thought) that, until yesterday, I had no idea that this was the case. But he knew, and, judging by Blackstar and Lazarus, he knew we’d know too.
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